Baking bread helps Othello students hone STEM skills

Learn. Bake. Share. That was the theme for fourth and fifth grade students from Wahitis, Lutacaga and Hiawatha Elementary, and seventh graders at McFarland Middle School who put their STEM skills to work while learning how to bake bread during assemblies held Nov. 28 thru Dec. 1.

Pam Jensen with the King Arthur Flour’s Bake for Good: Kids Learn to Bake Share Program, who traveled across country from Vermont, provided the instruction for roughly 1,000 students over the four-day period.

“This was an opportunity to show students how bread making includes skills on reading and following directions and how important that is — and to learn about measurements which of course deals with mathematics — and the science of how the yeast in bread works in the baking process of bread,” McFarland Instructional Coach Denise Colley said. “What was really cool about all of this is that it was an activity in which the kids really didn’t realize they were learning something while having fun baking bread.”

The kids not only learned how to bake bread, but were also shown how to convert the recipe into cinnamon rolls and pizza dough.

Wahitis Elementary teacher Tamar Lumsden and STEM director Jessica Schenck were the two who introduced the Bake for Good program to Othello School District officials who gave the thumbs up on the idea.

“Tamar and I were attending a National Science Teachers Association conference in Portland last spring where the King Arthur Flour Company put on a presentation. She and I thought it would be a fun thing to do and then we discussed it again over the summer and early fall and decided to try and make it happen,” Schenck said. “It evolved from a bread baking event to a STEM activity that allowed us to integrate different subjects with a single project so kids could see the connections — and provide answers to questions they were asking — why am I learning this – why am I doing this?”

On Thursday evening, Nov. 30, Wahitis Elementary hosted a bread baking and STEM activity night and invited the community to attend.

“There were 10 different stations set up for kids to do different experiments all having to do with math and science,” Schenck said. “One station was called the Chemical Change Cafe that dealt with chemical and physical change and cellular respiration. We had another station staged with hand warmers so kids could measure temperature changes — and Jenn Stevenson from the Old Hotel set up a station to create art by chemical change by using salt and water colors.”

Members of a local dairy were also on hand to show the kids how to make butter.

“These were all great hands-on events,” Schenck said. “We weren’t sure how many people were going to show up — were worried we wouldn’t get many people at all, but it turned out we were a bit overwhelmed with the response. It was incredible.”

All told there were 115 students plus some siblings and parents bringing the total attendance to roughly 250 individuals.

The event was such a success, Schenck foresees similar programs down the road.

“I’m hoping to do something like this again,” she said. “This was definitely encouraging – something the community would like to see more of.”